Top Army official: U.S. troops ready to go in Syria if Obama decides to act

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WASHINGTON, May 7 -- If President Barack Obama decided to send troops to Syria tomorrow, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond T. Odierno said the U.S. Army would be ready to go.

“I think if you’re asking today, we have forces that can go,” Odierno told a table full of reporters during the Defense Writers Group breakfast on Tuesday morning.

Odierno said the Army is prepared now and “we might have the capability to do it” in three or four months, but that waiting until next year could make it “a little more risky.” He said that readiness was okay “right now” but that it’s “degrading slightly.”

But, he said, the longer we wait, the more dangerous the prospect becomes because pre-existing financial constraints and sequestration-imposed cuts put necessary training for would-be deployed troops at risk.
In that respect, he said, money is a more daunting concern than manpower.

“It’s a matter of us having the dollars to make sure that they are ready and trained,” Odierno said.
How ready the military is changes over time.

Consequently, he said, risk rises.

“The increased risk goes up,” Odierno said. ”What is the risk? The risk is lives.”

Despite his emphasis on the urgent role of time in these considerations, however, Odierno emphasized that the ultimate decision about whether or not to deploy is in Obama’s hands.

Odierno said the president’s job is to decide what’s in the nation’s security interests, and that the Army’s job is to provide Obama a set of possible “options” for such initiatives. The comments come in the wake of a press briefing on Monday during which White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s formally condemned the Syrian government’s alleged use of chemical weapons.

“We are working through other means to try to build on the evidence that we already have of chemical weapons use, to assert in a concrete and firm way the chain of custody, when chemical weapons were used, by whom, and the full consequences of that use,” a White House transcript of the briefing quotes Carney as saying. “But that does, of course, take some time.”

Carney also said “a political transition in Syria” and dissociation from Syrian President Bashir al-Assad would be in the best interests of not only Syrian citizens, but “of all nations with a stake in the region” and the Middle East’s future.